“We cannot kill, even to save a world.”
Tom Kelly stretched his arms out stiffly behind him and bent forward, then back, from the waist. His head spun in slow circles when he lowered it, and the throb radiating from his groin picked up its tempo when the motion of his torso thrust his hips out. For all that, he felt better for the exercise; felt human at any rate, and that was an improvement over the way he’d felt since Gisela punched him in the balls.
Since he thought he saw her killed. No point in kidding himself about what the worst part of the shock had been.
Kelly stepped to the open door of the truck and picked up the radio, shielding it from the continuing drizzle with the flap of his coat.
“Somebody told you I was the right guy to contract out killing to, did they?” said Kelly. He was relieved enough that she was alive and he was alive – and for Chrissake, that somebody saw a way clear of a world disaster that was real clear even without the details – that the implications that he had just made overt didn’t bother him the way they usually did.
Not that it wasn’t true. The Lord knew he’d painted his reputation in the blood of more men than Doug and his buddies . . . and women too, bombs weren’t real fussy, and he’d used bombs when they seemed the choice.
The two of them were alone now, Kelly and the alien who talked. The other pair were jaywalking Gisela across the boulevard; safer, perhaps, than it looked because the traffic was crawling despite being bumper to bumper – but he’d let ’em go ahead for lack of a better idea, and he wasn’t going to second-guess matters now. “Do you have a name?” he demanded, wishing that it wasn’t raining, wishing a lot of things.
“Call me Wun, Mr. Kelly,” said the alien through the speaker beneath Kelly’s coat, and the face smiled as a fragment of headlight beam trolled across it. The ‘skin’ surface reflected normally, even showing streaks of rain, but Kelly knew from the corpse and the videotape that the perceived features were wholly immaterial.
“One as in bir, digit?” Kelly asked, translating the word he understood into Turkish and raising a single index finger.
“No, Mr. Kelly, more like the Spanish Juan,” said the other. “But just Wun. Are you not comfortable here?” He raised his arm toward the sky. “Should we go inside your vehicle?”
Kelly chopped his hand like a blade in the direction of the ancient walls. He didn’t feel like putting himself in a metal box, no, but the basalt ramparts were shelter of a sort against both rain and the breeze. He wondered if Mohammed Ayyubi had thought the same thing the night those stones had backstopped the bullets which killed him.
“Come on,” he said aloud. “Dunno that I’m ever going to be comfortable, but we can get outa some of the rain.”
“The Dienst has taken over your Fortress,” Wun said as they walked together, man and not-man, toward walls that were a stone patchwork of more than a thousand years. “They think to rule the Earth, at least to their satisfaction, because they are invulnerable and have the power to destroy whatever targets they may choose.”
No sign of bullet pocks on the hard stone, no certain sign in this light at any rate. The rubble and concrete foundations were Roman; the sections of large ashlars which sprawled across the fabric like birthmarks were probably Byzantine repairs; and the Turks, both Seljuk and Osmanli, had rebuilt the upper levels, perhaps many times, with squared stones of smaller and less regular size. The presence of the massive edifice gave Kelly a feeling of protection which he knew was specious, but anything to calm his subconscious was worthwhile so long as it let his intellect get on with what it needed to do.
“All right, then,” the veteran said, focusing his mind by planting his right palm against the wet stone, “it’s government level now and I’m tactical. So hell, it’s in somebody else’s court, and I don’t know that Gisela and her buddies are much crazier than some of the folk who’ve had their fingers on the button officially.”